VideoGame The DLC is mostly lackluster.
This review is to cover the DLC, now that DLC 6 is out.
Honestly, you can skip most of them.
A New Power Awakens - Part 1: - Good for grinding if you feel the need to. It's major highlight is we FINALLY get to see Vegeta as Super Saiyan God outside of the Dragon Ball Super manga and briefly in the Broly movie. Fighting Beerus is also really fun.
A New Power Awakens - Part 2: - Covers Resurrection F. It gives most of the Dragon Team something to do, even if the group battles get really boring really quickly. But it also has the problems that the original movie's story had.
Trunks: The Warrior of Hope: - It's a step in the right direction. It gives Trunks many of his iconic moments, losses and victories. Future Gohan's fate is also done really well. Also showing how Trunks met and dealt with Babadi and Dabura and prevented Majin Buu from being released was pretty fantastic. But beyond these moments, it's just alright.
Bardock: Alone Against Fate: - Really enjoyable and honestly the only way to experience Bardock: Father of Goku in dub form without any of the changes that the original dub had. The Super version of Bardock is mostly just Jor'El with a different coat of paint, so being able to experience Bardock as the amoral asshole who loves his job was a good time. This is a fun story from start to finish and revamps the group battle system for better or worse. It also helps flesh out Planet Vegeta and Saiyan society a bit, also the cameo of the Ginyu Force is just hilarious. Really from start to finish it might be the best DLC of the six.
The 23rd World Tournament: - Introduces ground battles, which are fun but really should have been in the game from the beginning. It starts with Kid Goku vs Demon King Piccolo which was cool, then skips to the tournament and does it justice. My biggest disappointment with this DLC is that it skips Piccolo Jr vs Krillin, which was one of the best fights in the original saga outside of Goku vs Piccolo.
Goku's Next Journey: - Utter disappointment to be honest. The best part of the DLC was Pan getting more screen time and showing why she has so much potential as a character. Outside of that and I guess the fight between Goku and Vegeta in the postgame, it was largely boring.
Overall, outside of Bardock: Alone Against Fate and The 23rd World Tournament, you're better off just watching gameplay on Youtube instead. And if you have a friend who has this game and the DLC, I'd say just play their copy. They're really short, so you could knock them out in 5 hours tops.
VideoGame It's Ok. (Main Game)
This is for the main game without any DLC included.
It's not a bad game and in some ways, it does a few things better than the main story. But at the same time, it feels like it did quite a bit more wrong than it did right.
Pros: - Some great moments that the manga and anime didn't have, showing more time between Goku and Gohan as well as the romantic couples. There's also sidequests that flesh out the lives of the Dragon Team outside of fighting strong guys or standing on the sidelines (And Yamcha's infidelity sidequest sadly). There's also some time to shine for Dragon Ball characters who faded into the background like Eighter, Nam and Launch.
- The graphics are mostly fantastic. Iconic moments have extra visual beauty like the classic beam clash between Goku and Vegeta, Vegeta's assault on Recoome and Goku going Super Saiyan. There's less of these moments after the Namek Saga which is unfortunate.
- The music is enjoyable for the most part. While I'm tired of Dragon Ball games constantly recycling Cha-La Head Cha-La because it feels like nostalgia bait, it does fit this game.
Cons:
- The combat gets very lazy and repetitive, with enemies having ridiculous amounts of health that requires you to spam Ki attacks just to get the fight over with. The random encounters especially have this problem, which makes exploring the world rather tedious.
- Getting all of the orbs you need to level up every character's skill tree is a real pain. While you will get a lot from story fights or sidequests, you have to waste a lot of time fighting random encounters which are just damage sponges.
- After the Saiyan Saga, the game becomes extremely lazy and rushed with how it handles the story. The Android and Cell Saga especially suffer from this, with Vegeta's Final Flash and Trunks' battle with Cell being completely skipped. Even the moments they do show just feel like the developers were rushing to get this over with. I can understand why, given that most Dragon Ball games just retell Z's story.
- This is a dub problem, but the dub is extremely lazy and flat at times. Again, I can understand that the cast probably weren't excited to redo Z's story, but several of the dub actors were clearly phoning it in to fulfill a contractual obligation.
- Many of the sidequests were tedious and not worth it, because 99% of them are fetch quests or fighting the same generic robot enemies yet again.
Overall, it's ok. If it's on sale and you're really really bored, it might be worth it? But you're probably better just watching a playthrough on Youtube.